Spit On A Griddle
My thoughts on The Last Showgirl
The last few years have seen a concerted effort by Pamela Anderson to reclaim the narrative of her life from a popular culture perspective that, practically from the moment she first burst onto the scene via the pages of Playboy and on Baywatch, tended to treat her as little more than a bimbo, most infamously in the notoriously cruel and sexist ways that the media responded to the theft and subsequent dissemination of a private sex tape, an event later portrayed largely for laughs in the 2022 miniseries Pam & Tommy. In the last couple of years alone, she has appeared on Broadway to acclaim in Chicago, released a well-received second memoir and a Netflix documentary giving her perspective on her life and has become an unexpected symbol for aging gracefully by her recent determination to go makeup-free in her public appearances. Now, as a sort of unofficial culmination to that rehabilitation campaign, she is starring in the new film The Last Showgirl and while it is hardly the first time she has graced the big screen, it is an infinitely more serious-minded work than the likes of Barb Wire and her performance has been generating enough talk over the last few months to put her in the running for this year’s Oscar race, a notion that once upon a time might have only appeared as a punchline in a middling SNL sketch.
In the film, she plays Shelly, a veteran showgirl who has been with Le Razzle Dazzle, a topless revue on the Vegas strip for 30 years. The show may be an institution but it is also a relic of the past that has long been supplanted by newer, flashier and racier shows and as the story begins, the show’s producer, Eddie (Dave Bautista), announces that it will be closing for good in a couple of weeks. For the younger dancers like Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), for whom Shelly serves as a sort of self-appointed mother hen, the announcement is a bummer, of course, but they take the news in stride—they can just go out and get new jobs with other shows. For Shelly, who has allowed her role in the show to essentially define who she is as a person, the news poleaxes her as she realizes that she has invested 30 years of her life and made innumerable sacrifices for it and now has absolutely nothing to show for it. Over the course of the final days of the show, Shelly tries to take stock of her life and figure out her next move as her dream life inexorably segues into grim reality.
To get the big question out of the way—yes, Anderson is quite good here and not just by the standards of someone whose most notable previous role had them bouncing around on a beach and exchanging dialogue with David Hasselhoff. It might not be the revelatory turn that it has been hyped up in some quarters (the fact that she landed a SAG award nomination while Marianne Jean-Baptiste failed to earn one for her truly stunning work in Hard Truths is more than a little absurd) but she delivers a fine, touching and sympathetic performance as she charts the newly unmoored Shelly as she tries to find her place in this new existence, doing everything she can to put a positive spin of what is happening while still suggesting the hurt, anger and despair bubbling just beneath her smiling surface. In her scenes with Bautista (who continues to evolve into an effective character actor) and Jamie Lee Curtis (as her best friend, another former showgirl now reduced to working as a waitress on the same Strip where she once performed), she more than holds her own with them as well as well.
The problem, however, is that her efforts, considerable as they may be, are ultimately not enough to make up for the triteness of the film as a whole. The screenplay by Kate Gersten is clearly trying to emulate the structure and spirit of the striking similar The Wrestler, right down to having its aging entertainer central character attempting to reestablish a bond with a now-adult child who was largely ignored in the pursuit of fame (here played by Billie Lourd). However, while that film refused to look away from the uneasy truths of the story at hand, Gersten spends more time straining for easy emotional catharsis in scenes that seem designed more for cheap applause and award-show clips than for plausibility—one sequence, in which Shelly auditions for a disinterested director (Jason Schwartzman) and then tells him off when he dismisses her, is so badly handled that it winds up making her look like a fool (it has been a while, admittedly, but her reaction suggests that she has little grasp of how auditions actually work) and making viewers a little annoyed at how cravenly their sympathies are being manipulated. The film was directed by Gia Coppola and while the dreamily enigmatic aesthetic that she establishes is clearly evocative of her aunt, Sofia Coppola, she never quite connects to the material in any meaningful way, allowing the undeniable connections between Shelly’s situation and that of the woman playing her to do the majority of the heavy lifting when all is said and done.
Ultimately, The Last Showgirl is as flimsy and insubstantial from a dramatic standpoint as the costume that Shelly wears during the show and is constantly damaging in a running bit that I suspect is meant to be a tad symbolic. It makes vague stabs at commenting on issues regarding to age and gender dynamics but doesn’t really have anything on note to say about them, preferring instead more self-consciously evocative moments like Shelly contemplating her future while standing next to the Blue Angel Statue or the Jamie Lee Curtis character jumping up on a table in the middle of a waitressing shift to dreamily gyrate to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Yes, the Anderson performance is good but not quite good enough to save the film, though perhaps it will cause other filmmakers to see what she can do and inspire them to cast her in stronger projects in the future.